Fine of the Month: February 2011

(Stephen Church)

1. The Excommunication of Beatrice de Faye

The role, or agency, of aristocratic women in the thirteenth century is an issue often
explored in Fines of the Month. Here, Stephen Church, Professor of Medieval History at
the University of East Anglia, gives a fascinating account of the attempts by one such
woman to assert herself against a husband determined to use every tactic in the book to
discredit and ultimately divorce her, including bringing the stigma of excommunication
upon her.

⁋1The heroine of this Fine of the Month was born Beatrice of Turnham sometime around the
year 1200. She was the youngest of five daughters of the long-serving royal household
retainer, Stephen of Turnham, and his wife, Edeline (or Odelina), herself the daughter and
granddaughter of royal servants. When we meet her in the fine rolls in 1241, Beatrice was
deep in a struggle to save herself from the ignominy of being divorced at the instigation
of her third husband, Hugh de Plessetis. Although we cannot be certain how the case ended,
it is clear that Beatrice was not a passive victim of Hugh’s determination to rid himself
of his unwanted wife. On the contrary, she refused to take easily the affront of Hugh’s
petition for a divorce. Hugh was forced to pay dearly for his ambitions and Beatrice
actively fought her husband in the struggle for the marriage.

⁋2But before I delve more deeply into the events that marred the end of Beatrice’s life, I
first want to sketch out what is known of Beatrice up to 1241. Beatrice’s story is one of
a much-married heiress, whose life, in microcosm, represents the lives of many women in
the upper stratum of English society in the years that spanned the first half of the
thirteenth century.1 Beatrice’s maternal grandfather, Ranulf de
Broc, and great-grandfather, Oin Purcell, had held in succession the serjeanty of usher of
the king’s chamber, with special responsibility for the prostitutes of the court; and
Ranulf had also held the royal marshalsea.2 When Beatrice’s mother
had married Stephen of Turnham, sometime late in the reign of King Henry II, she brought
to him this serjeanty along with the majority of the landed wealth that Stephen would
enjoy.3
Stephen served successively in the households of Henry II, Richard I, and John, and under
John, he regularly had care of the king’s young wife, Isabella, and their elder son, the
future Henry III, when they stayed at Winchester, as well as of Eleanor of Brittany, King
John’s niece.4
Presumably, therefore, it was at Winchester that Beatrice and her four sisters spent their
early years in the company of members of the royal family. It must have been an
extraordinarily privileged childhood.

⁋3The five Turnham girls were all of marriageable age by the time of their father’s death,
sometime between 1213 and 1214. Each had a husband when they petitioned the king for a
share in their inheritances.5 Their
statuses as heiresses made them very desirable in the marriage market.6 The girls married well. Beatrice herself, who was perhaps the youngest of
the five daughters,7 married Ralph II de Faye,
the son of Ralph I de Faye lord of Faye-la-Vineuse in Poitou,8 sometime before 6 March 1214 (when Peter des Roches was ordered to allow
Ralph seisin of certain escheats which belonged to land which he held in right of his
wife).9 Ralph, like his late father-in-law,
seems to have been a household official,10 who had, in 1212, held key roles
in Angoulême with, amongst others, Geoffrey de Neville the king’s
chamberlain.11 His father, Ralph I, sometime in
the mid 1150s, had been promoted in England by Henry II and given the manor of Bramley,
Surrey.12 His lands were confiscated in
1173, according to an entry in the Book of Fees, as a result of his actions in the war
between Henry II and the Young King; by the early 1190s, he was dead.13 Beatrice’s Ralph (who had recovered the
manor by the grant of King John in 1199), therefore, must have been considerably older
than his young wife at the time that they were married.14
Ralph II de Faye was dead by the end of April 1223 having remained steadfastly loyal to
the royalist cause throughout his life.15

⁋4Beatrice’s second marriage was to another aged widower and royal servant, Hugh de
Neville, chief justice of the forest under Richard and John and, between 1224 and 1229,
for Henry III, too.16
Hugh’s first wife, Joan, was dead by 1224, though the earliest reference to Hugh’s
marriage to Beatrice is in April 123017. Beatrice was still acting in her own capacity in September 1226 when she
put in her place Richard of Frobury (Frobury, Hampshire, was where her mother had held
land)18 in a suit against her
brother-in-law, Thomas de Bavelingham, for a debt of 25 shillings that he owed to
her.19 She was pursuing another case in
February 1227 through the same attorney against a certain William de Capella for services
withheld in her holdings in Turnham, Kent. Four of the five sisters seem to have held an
interest in this manor, which suggests that their father’s toponym reflected his place of
origin.20 And by September 1227, she was still being associated with her late
husband’s brother, John, in a suit for rental arrears in Chiddingfold,
Surrey.21 The marriage to Hugh de Neville
presumably took place, therefore, between September 1227 and April 1230. Beatrice
continued to litigate after her marriage to Hugh right up until the time of Hugh’s death
in 1234, when she received £20 of dower land in South Stoke, Sussex.22

⁋5Having been widowed for a second time – in what must have been her mid-thirties –
Beatrice agreed to contract a third marriage to yet another royal servant, Hugh de
Plessetis. He is an enigmatic man in the sources. Someone of that name was associated with
John de Plessetis (the future earl of Warwick) in the 1220s.23 But this Hugh de
Plessetis was dead by 6 August 1231, when his executors were given authority to use his
chattels and crops on his shared manor of Chalgrave in Oxfordshire for the execution of
his testament.24 Beatrice’s Hugh, it seems likely, was the justice in eyre in Surrey, Kent,
Hampshire, and Sussex in 1235, where he was associated with William of York, William de
Insula, and Ralph of Norwich;25 he also seems to have been a major tenant of Earl William de Warenne and was
perhaps related to John de Plessetis, the earl’s steward.26 Quite when Hugh and Beatrice married is unclear,
for the first we hear of them occupying the married state is when we are informed that the
divorce between the two was under way.27

⁋6The documents that were produced as a result of the divorce proceedings make it plain
that Beatrice did not take her dismissal by Hugh either lightly or easily. Beatrice
mustered her forces to make the divorce extremely difficult indeed, despite the fact that
the odds were stacked against her. Beatrice’s husband, for example, would have expected to
have control over all aspects of his wife’s life, including the use of physical
correction, such as tying down and the withholding of food, should he have deemed it
necessary. He also had rights over his wife’s property, including the dower lands that she
had brought with her to the marriage, which she had received as a result of outliving her
two previous husbands.28 It was these lands that Hugh sought to use against his wife, evidently
attempting to force Beatrice into accepting the inevitable by starving her of the funds
she needed to live out her existence and to fight her case. The first notice we have of
Beatrice and Hugh’s marriage and divorce comes on 18 May 1240 when a writ was raised by
the king’s officers to the sheriff of Sussex and another to the sheriff of Surrey ordering
them to allow Beatrice the dower lands of her late husbands Hugh de Neville and Ralph de
Faye in Sussex and in Surrey while the divorce case continued ‘lest in the meantime
Beatrice be reduced to beggary’.29
Hugh de Plessetis was playing dirty. But the fact that Beatrice had managed to have this
writ issued shows that she must have been using her contacts at court to plead her cause
with the king. Beatrice was not simply supine in this affair. Her track record of
litigation, which I outlined earlier on in this essay, makes it clear that Beatrice was a
practiced litigator who needed no husband to guide her through the ways of the court. She
was certainly litigating in her own right, as any widow might, during her first period of
widowhood after the death of Ralph de Faye, and her family connections meant that she
could get the royal court onside, even though the ecclesiastical court would turn out to
be a harder nut to crack.30

⁋7The grounds that Hugh had for divorce are unclear. Marriage might only be annulled for
certain specific reasons, and it appears that divorce (effectively the judgment that the
marriage had never been valid and had therefore never existed) was extremely
rare.31 Since Hugh was the driving force behind this divorce, it seems likely
that it was granted on the grounds of consanguinity: one is certainly struck by the ways
in which royal servants firstly had family traditions of service in the king’s court and
secondly married into other families with similar traditions of royal service, so it is
not impossible that Beatrice and Hugh were related in some way within the prohibited four
degrees;32 though of course we cannot rule out the chance that Hugh had
accused his wife of a heinous crime, such as adultery. Whatever its cause, the case was
long running. On 11 February 1241, the king was forced to reiterate his earlier order of
nine months before insisting that the sheriffs of Sussex and of Surrey hand over to
Beatrice her dower lands.33
Beatrice might have the king on her side, but Hugh de Plessetis must have been counting on
his own connections to keep the king’s officers at bay and had evidently refused to give
up his control of Beatrice’s dower lands. The next April, however, it had become clear
that the sheriffs had managed to extract at least some of the lands from Hugh, as the
sheriff of Sussex was commanded to find further lands to make up the amount of dower land
that was due to Beatrice.34
Beatrice, for the moment, had at least won the battle to get hold of lands that had come
to her as dower. She was not going to be forced to beg.

⁋8At a point after the April writ of 1241, Beatrice and Hugh’s case came up before court
Christian (the ecclesiastical court which had jurisdiction over the case), which, it
seems, was presided over by the bishops of London and of Ely.35 One of two things happened at this session, either Beatrice refused to
appear before the court or she appeared and the court adjudicated against her and she
refused to accept its decision. In either circumstance, the next step taken by the court
is clear: it issued a sentence of excommunication for contumacy (a rare occurrence,
according to Helmholz’s findings, indicating something of the nature of the divorce case
and perhaps the determination of Hugh to make it happen).36 Beatrice may well have had good cause for
refusing to accept the legitimacy of that particular ecclesiastical court presided over by
the bishops of London and of Ely. The ordinary for Surrey was the bishop of Winchester
while that for Sussex was the bishop of Chichester,37 while her Turnham lands lay in the diocese of
Canterbury.38 London and Ely, Beatrice might have argued, ought not to have had
jurisdiction over her.39 Hugh de Plessetis, however, was not
going to let a technical point like that get in the way of his ambitions. At this juncture
in this essay, it is worth citing the fine in full:

⁋9‘To the sheriff of Surrey. The king has ordered him at other times to do justice to
Beatrice de Faye by her body according to the custom of England, who has been
excommunicated on account of her manifest contumacy by the bishops of London and Ely.
Because, as the king has truly heard, he has not yet executed the king’s command in any
way, order to execute this order without delay, so that the king might impute nothing to
his negligence. Order to cause Hugh de Plessetis to have full seisin of the lands that he
had of the dower of the same Beatrice in his bailiwick. Order to take security from Hugh
for 20 m. to the king’s use for this writ. Order to the sheriff of Sussex to cause the
same Hugh to have seisin of the lands of the dower of the same Beatrice in his
bailiwick’.40

⁋10This is an extraordinary fine, unique in the fine rolls so far published (in print down
to 1242 at the time of writing, but to the end of the reign online). What it demonstrates
is that Hugh de Plessetis was taking an active role in not simply divorcing his wife but
in aiding the court in the process of bringing his wife to ecclesiastical judgment. It is
possible to reconstruct something of the events that must have occurred leading up to the
moment that this fine was raised because we know quite a bit about the process of
excommunication and the role of the secular arm in implementing such sentences. In a
remarkable piece of work published in the 1960s, Donald F. Logan exhaustively explored the
process of excommunication in England.41 He showed that by the time that
Beatrice had received her sentence, the role of the secular arm in the execution of
sentences of excommunication had become fully established, and that the process was
clear-cut. First a sentence of excommunication could only have been issued for contumacy,
which means that Beatrice must have been resisting the ecclesiastical court in order to be
excommunicated in the first place, either by refusing to attend or by refusing to accept
its decision. Second, that by 1241 the process by which the secular arm became involved in
coercing the recusant had become bureaucratically very straightforward. If, after 40 days,
the person excommunicated refused to seek absolution and to accept the medicine designed
to heal his or her soul, then the ordinary (that is the bishop of the diocese in which the
wayward parishioner resided) might send a letter to Chancery (a ‘signification’ from its
opening word signficavit) requesting a writ to be issued to the sheriff or sheriffs in
whose territories the excommunicate resided ordering them to capture and to detain the
named person and hold him or her until he or she had come to terms with the court that had
issued the sentence. By 1241, this writ – called the writ capiendum
after the phrase de excommmunicato capiendo that is found in its form –
was issued de cursu, providing the forms were correct, and so was
issued by the junior clerks in Chancery without reference to higher authority. Beatrice
must, therefore, have been excommunicated 40 days before such a writ had been issued – one
had to be incorrigible to have a writ capiendum raised against one –
and it is further clear that the sheriffs to whom that writ had been issued had not
proceeded against Beatrice by taking her captive. One is therefore led to wonder if this
is a further example of how Beatrice’s contacts in the higher reaches of the royal
household were paying dividends. I could not find a connection between Beatrice and the
then sheriff of Surrey, Gregory of Oxted,42 but it would be unwise to rule one out. In any event, Gregory, who
was sheriff throughout the period of the divorce case, as we have seen, had helped
Beatrice to secure her dower lands which her husband Hugh had been withholding from her.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he deliberately failed to implement the
writ de capiendo because Beatrice had connections that made him
unwilling (or even unable) to carry out its terms.

⁋11The fine that Hugh de Plessetis made with the king was for the not inconsiderable sum of
20 marks. Hugh was determined to have his divorce, and if the bishops of London and of Ely
were unwilling to press the matter, Hugh would press it for them. The fine under
discussion was enrolled under the date of 11 October 1241. The following February (1242),
the sheriff of Surrey was again ordered to disseise Beatrice from her lands while she was
under sentence of excommunication.43 Evidently Beatrice was still trying to hang onto the marriage in a titanic
struggle of wills. After this point, something happened to stop the continued persecution
of Beatrice, a point that is evident because entries in the royal records on this matter
cease: either Beatrice was dead or the determination of the court Christian to agree to
Hugh’s petition for divorce had been executed. The next time we hear of Beatrice de Faye,
she is not the central character. The year is 1246, and her dower lands in Surrey have
long been in the king’s hands and are only just being released to the Neville
family.44 Hugh de Plessetis did
not enjoy his unmarried state for long. On 17 November 1244, a fine was enrolled on the
fine rolls for an order to be raised instructing the sheriff of Norfolk that there had
been a determination in the king’s court that Hugh’s unnamed heir should pay his relief to
the dowager countess rather than to the king and that the lands should be released to the
countess.45 Evidently now Hugh de Plessetis was
dead.

⁋12Beatrice de Faye was not a passive victim of her third husband’s determination to rid
himself of his wife. She was prepared and able to litigate in court at her own
instigation. She was prepared and able actively to seek out royal support for her cause.
She was capable of manipulating the family connections that she had enjoyed throughout her
life, and she knew how to be stubborn in the face of the law, whether ecclesiastical or
secular. It maybe that she did lose her struggle to hang onto her marriage – we do not
know – but we do know that her actions delayed Hugh’s plans for at the very least a year
and a half, and possibly for as long as Beatrice drew breath. This descendant of a long
line of royal servants was not going to be easily discarded: she did her lineage proud.
And although we cannot argue from silence in the sources, it would be a suitable end to
this story to imagine that whatever plans Hugh might have had were thwarted by Beatrice de
Faye.

⁋13I hope that what I have achieved in exploring this particular Fine of the Month is to
show that in Beatrice de Faye we have a thirteenth-century woman who, like others whose
lives have recently been explored by scholars, had agency in her own right. She was not
simply the appendage of her father or her husbands, and neither was she independently
active only when she was widowed. Beatrice de Faye had freedom to act in a world dominated
by men but by men who could not and did not ignore a woman of Beatrice’s connections and
steeliness of character.46

Footnotes

1.

Most of this story can be pieced together from the notes that
David Crook made to accompany his and Meekings’ edition of The 1235 Surrey
Eyre, 2 vols, ed. C.A.F. Meekings and D. Crook, (Surrey Record Society, 31,
1979), i, pp. 140, 192–93, 229–30. Back to context...

2.

Liber Feodorum. The Book of Fees
Commonly Called Testa de Neville, 3 vols. (London, 1920–31), p. 1377. The word
used is ‘meretrices’. Ranulf played a role as one of the main
protagonists in the persecution of Thomas Becket (cf The Acta of Henry
II, ed. N. Vincent et al (forthcoming) no. 328). Back to context...

CFR 1218–19, no. 119: Mabel de Gatton (mistakenly
transcribed as Sebilla in Pipe Roll 16 John, p. 32) married Thomas of
Bavelingham; Alice married Adam de Bendenges; Eleanor married Roger of Leybourne (who
had been in Stephen’s custody as a minor, and was a neighbour in Kent. Stephen had fined
in 300 marks to enjoy the custody and maritagium over the heir – Pipe Roll 10
Richard I, p. 210; Pipe Roll 10 John, p. 100); another Eleanor
(her alternative name seems to have been Clementia – Pipe Roll 16 John,
p. 32; Pipe Roll 2 Henry III, p. 63) married first Henry de Braiboef
(Pipe Roll 2 Henry III, p. 63) and second Ralph son of Bernard de Tang’
(Pipe Roll 3 Henry III, p. 145); and Beatrice married Ralph de Faye.
They fined in 5 palfreys for their inheritances and for the debts that their father owed
at the Exchequer (cf. Pipe Roll 5 Henry III, p. 202; Pipe Roll 6
Henry III, p. 64). Margaret de Layburn, mother of Roger de Layburn
(Pipe Roll 7 Henry III, p. 95), who had fined in £100 and two palfreys
in order to be free to marry whomsoever she wished (Pipe Roll 9 John, p.
37), became initially responsible for Roger’s share of the debt he owed to enter into
the shared inheritance (Pipe Roll 4 Henry III, p. 157). Back to context...

6.

Their mother,
Edelina, fined in 40 marks and a palfrey to have freedom to marry whomever she pleased
so long as he was not one of the king’s enemies (Pipe Roll 16 John, p.
36). Back to context...

7.

Mabel was certainly the eldest, being described as such in July
1214 when she acted on behalf of the sisters (RLC, i, p. 168), and the
order in which the sisters appear consistently has Mabel as appearing first and Beatrice
last. The order may have some significance, therefore. Back to context...

Rot. Chart.,
p. 62b. The marriage produced no children, though Ralph II appears to have had a son by
a previous marriage. This son, John de Faye, was holding 2 knights’ fees of the Bramley
manor in 1237 and in 1242 his mother (more likely) or grandmother, Philippa, was holding
another knight’s fee and a half (Book of Fees, pp. 617, 686). Back to context...

15.

As was Beatrice’s sister, Alice (CFR
1222–23, nos. 106, 187).
Their mother, Edelina, seems to have been dead by 29 April 1221 (CFR
1220–21, nos. 138). Back to context...

RLC, ii, p. 207b; this was 100 shillings worth of land
which John of Waltham admitted he held in 1258/9, probably amounting to 12 acres, which
was the amount the late Roger Leybourne, Beatrice’s brother-in-law (he had married
Eleanor), held in the estate according to the same testimony. Beatrice’s sister Alice,
had 20 shillings worth of land in the estate (Calendar of Kent Feet of Fines to
the end of Henry III’s Reign, ed. Irene J. Churchill, R. Griffin, F.W.
Hardman, and F.W. Jessop (Kent Records, 15, 1956), p. 298); their sister Mabel also held
in the manor, agreeing with a certain Robert de Manekeseya that he owed her 6d p.a. or a
pair of gilt spurs for the free tenement he held of Mabel (Kent Feet of
Fines, p. 122). Clemency/Eleanor appears not to have held an interest in the
manor, which raises the question whether or not she was a legitimate daughter of Stephen
of Thornham. Back to context...

Close
Rolls 1231–34, pp. 489 (2), 490. Beatrice came to an agreement about her dower
lands in South Stoke, Sussex, in Trinity Term 1235 (Curia Regis Rolls of the
Reign of Henry III (1233–37), no. 1109; W. Farrer, Honors and Knights’
Fees, 3 vols (London 1923–25), iii, p. 48). Back to context...

23.

Patent Rolls of
the Reign of Henry III Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1216–25,
(London, 1901), p. 497; Calendar of Charter Rolls of the Reign of Henry III
Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1226–1257 (London, 1908), p. 108;
Book of Fees, pp. 446, 555, 613, 1395. Back to context...

24.

Close Rolls 1227–31, p. 540. The difficulties involved in untangling
the Hugh de Plessetises has led Crook, following Farrer, to see Beatrice’s Hugh de
Plessetis as the widower of Philippa de Montfichet. (The 1235 Surrey
Eyre, i, pp. 239–30; Honors and Knights’ Fees, iii, p. 336).
Back to context...

B.L. Woodcock,
Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts in the Diocese of Canterbury (Oxford,
1952). Back to context...

36.

Helmholz, Marriage
Litigation, pp. 115–17; Woodcock, Courts… Canterbury, pp. 93–97
also thought excommunication was rare as a first step, the Canterbury court preferring
suspension first only resorting to excommunication when the ‘culprit’s offence was
manifest, that is, in his refusing to obey the court outright or hindering the apparitor
in his duty’, with signification (see below) an ‘extreme weapon’. Beatrice had seriously
annoyed the bishops of London and Ely. Back to context...

37.

C. Podmore, ‘Dioceses and
episcopal sees in England: a background report for the Dioceses Commission’, Church of
England, July 2008, pp. 22–23. Back to context...

38.

M. Morgan, ‘Early Canterbury jurisdiction’, EHR 60
(1945), 392–99 (at p. 398). It may well have been because Canterbury was vacant that
London sought jurisdiction over Beatrice and Hugh’s case. London sat is special
relationship to Canterbury by the agreement of 1278, an agreement which looks like it
solidified earlier practice (Woodcock, Courts… Canterbury, pp.
15–16). Back to context...

39.

Woodcock, Courts… Canterbury, p. 13 argues that
the diocesan jurisdiction was a later thirteenth-century development in Canterbury, and
it may well have been that during Beatrice’s time, the diocesan jurisdictional
boundaries were yet to be firmly established. Back to context...

F.D. Logan, Excommunication and the
Secular Arm in Medieval England: A Study in Legal Procedure from the Thirteenth to the
Sixteenth Centuries, Studies and Texts 15, (Toronto, 1968). This supersedes
R.M.T. Hill, ‘The theory and practice of excommunication in medieval England’,
History 42 (1957), 1–11. Back to context...

42.

List of Sheriffs for England and
Wales from the Earliest Times to AD 1831, List and Indexes, no. 9, (London,
1898), p. 135. Back to context...